Regime change: Be careful what you wish for

American policy, John Bolton wrote in the Wall Street Journal in January, “should be ending Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution before its 40th anniversary.”

“Recognizing a new Iranian regime in 2019” he wrote, “would reverse the shame of once seeing our diplomats held hostage for 444 days.”

Regime change!

Revenge – Revenge as a pillar of American foreign policy!

John Bolton’s op-ed echoed Bibi Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to Congress, where the Israeli Prime Minister exploited the dark atavistic need of many Americans to get revenge – payback – for what they believe are unresolved foreign policy issues.

Some still can’t see beyond the 1979 hostage crisis or beyond 9/11.

Incapable of processing all that America has done to destabilize the Middle East – especially the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a combination of fear and rage makes many Americans unable to move beyond a need to strike out at people whom they believe are challenging their Western, Judaeo-Christian world order.

That’s the message from Netanyahu and Bolton – and today from Donald Trump; how can the people who did these things be trusted, especially when we’ve yet to fully extract our pound of flesh for depredations they visited upon us?

That, today, is part of why an intellectually challenged, historically ignorant President Trump chose to unilaterally violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Ignorant of the fact, perhaps, that in 1957, Iran became one of the first beneficiaries of America’s "Atoms for Peace” program; that by 1968, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom America had placed upon a peacock throne after overthrowing Mossadegh in 1953, had established the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which still operates.

That in 1970, Iran ratified the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), making its program subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verification, a program that continues and will continue beyond JCPOA, something Israel, for example, a nuclear-armed state, has never done.

Nine years later everything changed.

On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah was overthrown and, within a month, Ayatollah Khomeini triumphantly returned to Iran and established the Islamic Republic – subjecting millions of Iranians, recently liberated from 26 years of tyrannical rule by the Shah – to decades more tyranny, this time by theocrats.

Months later, Iranian students – many waving signs with Mossadegh’s picture on them – stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 hostages, holding them for 444 days.

In partial response, America openly supported Iraq in an eight-year war against Iran, a catastrophic war with over a million casualties, further isolating and radicalizing the Ayatollahs.

In response, too, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) an Iranian terrorist organization that had first campaigned against the Shah, and which then became an enthusiastic supporter of the Ayatollahs, fell out out with the regime and launched a terror campaign against them.

A 1992 State Department report identified MEK – originally known as the People's Holy Warriors of Iran – as responsible for killing six Americans in Iran, including three military officers. In 1997, MEK was among the first organizations placed upon America’s list of foreign terrorists.

In 2012, after a concerted effort to remove MEK was removed from the list of designated terrorist organizations.

It was removed due to the generous MEK-financed efforts of Americans like former CIA directors James Woolsey and Porter Goss; former FBI director Louis Freeh; former attorney general Michael Mukasey; Obama’s first national security adviser James Jones. MEK supporters include Democrats Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson and Lee Hamilton, and Republicans Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Fran Townsend, Tom Ridge and Andrew Card.

John Bolton, a long-time backer of the Mujahideen-e Khalq, has actually spoken at eight MEK rallies.

Long live killers of Americans – as long as they are our our terrorists!

Netanyahu and Bolton were lead cheerleaders – lacking only pom-poms – for Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, which fractured the Middle East, exacerbated sectarian tensions and resulted in chaos, violence and terror that continues to this day.

This isn’t a column to defend Iran. Its missile program and military and terror engagement needs to be confronted, but not by tearing up JCPOA. That’s not what the accord was designed to do.

This, too, is not a column to defend the JCPOA – it needs no defense. As the most significant anti-proliferation accord of the last quarter-century, and perhaps as a template for future negotiations with other states – it needs protection not justification.

Iran, up to the moment President Trump violated JCPOA, was in full compliance with the accord and has been since it was adopted in 2015.

Critically, the issue is not Iran’s nuclear program – or lack of one. The issue is the manner it has been able to project its regional hegemony – a hegemony gifted to it by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

No, the issue is the ego of a man trying to reverse the perceived “shame of once seeing our diplomats held hostage …” – and willing to risk the security of a nation by going to war over it.

The issue is the ignorance of a jealous, petty, narcissistic autocrat determined to reverse every program initiated by President Barack Obama – regardless of its value.

The issue is pettiness.

When Trump moved to reinstate American nuclear sanctions on Iran, calling the JCPOA a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” he risked the possibility of not only further empowering Iranian hard-liners, who were already in tension with those who argue for more engagement with America and the West, but perhaps force Tehran to seek alliances inimical to American interests, including with Russia and China.

Trump’s, Netanyahu’s and Bolton’s gambit is a reckless attempt to try to sustain Israel’s regional conventional and nuclear military hegemony – a hegemony increasingly challenged by a politically ascendant Iran.

Blinded by their egos, limited by their ambitions, together they fail to realize that in confrontation there will be no winners, that in confrontation the only regime change affected might, in the end, be their own.

Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. He can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

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